"Knock on Wood and Touch Grass"

 “Knock on Wood and Touch Grass”

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

Look around the place you’re in and start thinking about all of the items that are connected to trees. I’ll give you a moment to look around. 

Okay, what did we find? Zoomers, you can put yours in the chat, please. (Take examples: pews, tables, cross, electricity from coal, air that we breathe, rayon in fabric, paper.)

Make no mistake, we humans are intimately intertwined with trees. This summer we’re spending time journeying alongside UCC pastor Daniel Cooperrider and his book Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You. By exploring the four natural elements of water, fire, earth, and air, Cooperrider helps readers “reread the Bible in a living, breathing, yearning, determined search for God from the perspective of nature.” [1] 

Cooperrider notes that trees are featured on the opening and closing pages of the Bible. He writes, “Other than God and humans, trees are the most mentioned living thing in scripture.” [2] Trees are a living testament to the earth element. They spring forth from the earth and are connected to all the other elements. Like us, they are made up mostly of water. Like us, they breathe air. Like us, they either decompose or return to the earth through fire.

Our biblical stories of creation point to our deep connection with the earth through trees. When the first human is created, God forms the human, adam, from the adamah - the human from the humus. Adam, that Hebrew word for the first human in the creation narrative, is an earth-creature, a dirt-dweller. Just as the sweeping stories of the Bible begin and end with trees, humanity has its origin and its ends in the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

Our ancestors slept under canopies and lived in forests, surrounded by trees. These days, most of us are much more disconnected from our tree-cousins. And yet….we, too, sleep, eat, work, worship in buildings made from trees. Children are often wiser than adults and they remember their connection to trees more easily than we do - climbing trees, swinging from swings held in their branches, building tree houses and forts. And like those ancient stories in our Hebrew Bible, we maintain a connection to trees in our English language. Human comes from humus - people from the earth. Humility means to be in touch with the earth. When we are centered we say we are “grounded.” When we need to remember something important we tell one another to “remember your roots.”

Trees and humans have a symbiotic relationship, as I’m sure you know. Have you ever seen one of those pictures of a tree’s root system right next to a human lung? The roots of the tree look just like the bronchi and bronchioles in our lungs. Humans were created partially to consume oxygen. In doing so, we have a symbiotic relationship with nature. Bishop Michael Curry puts it this way: we live because of trees. Trees live because of us. 

Our sacred stories testify to this powerful human-tree connection. As Cooperrider mentioned, trees are absolutely everywhere in the Bible. He reminds us that sacred scripture “begins with the Tree of Knowledge and ends with the Tree of Life….trees loom like an old growth forest over the tangled undergrowth of scripture…..If you’re looking for significant landmarks to guide your path through the tangled bark of scripture, look for the blazes on tree trunks like you would on a hiking trail.” [4] 

In the very beginning of our sacred scriptures, we see this intimate connection between humans and trees in both of our creation narratives. In the first story, in Genesis 1, trees are given a unique place of honor and privilege. On the third day, the day when trees begin to grace the earth in this story, God pronounces a “double blessing.” It is the only day in the story where God pronounces creation good TWICE. It is also the day when we begin to see the powerful co-creation theme in the story. [5] God does not “bloop, bloop, bloop” plop the trees down like they’re playing a sandbox video game. Instead, God calls upon creation to create: the earth itself brings forth life that has the ability to create new life on autopilot - seeds and fruit bearing forth new life, generation after generation. 

I think it is this deep, mystical kinship with our tree-cousins that children are aware of when they feel the urge to climb into a tree. We feel it when we sense that unwinding of our anxious spirits when we make time to walk in a forest or sit under a tree's lovely branches. We can even tap into this kinship in our daily lives if we take the time to be mindful of the human-tree connection when we feel our feet touch the wooden floor when we get out of bed in the morning, or write on a piece of paper, or eat a handful of almonds. Perhaps we can even pause as we leave the house to say hello and thank you to a favorite tree in our yard, offering gratitude to the earth in the same way we kiss our family goodbye. 

This deep and intimate connection between trees and humans continues in our second creation narrative, the one we heard part of today. That poor, maligned apple tree that wasn’t even an apple tree. The earth-creature that we call Adam was told not to eat from the fruit of the tree in the center of the garden. (Incidentally, Eve wasn’t even there when God gave that warning, but that’s a sermon for another day.) This story that has sometimes been framed as a story about “original sin” has as many interpretations as there are leaves on your favorite tree. 

I want to share with you Cooperrider’s interpretation which blew my mind. [6] He notes that when trees appear in this story we are told “God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” But when the humans, later, see that tree in the middle of the garden we are told that “the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes…and she took and ate.” Did you catch that subtle shift? The humans reverse the order. God said the trees are first and foremost pleasant to the sight. They are there to be appreciated for their beauty and their tree-ness. It’s only secondary that they exist to help fuel our human bodies. 

Perhaps the problem is that we humans have a tendency to get things wildly out of order. Rather than appreciating the tree for its own unique, inherent, beauty - it’s tree-ness, we see it primarily as a thing that exists for our benefit. God told the humans they could eat from all the other trees - there was no danger of starvation, there was plenty to go around. But the humans saw this beautiful tree not as its own uniquely valuable self but solely as something to be consumed. They got it backwards. And that was the problem and the cautionary tale. 

The tree was in the center of the garden and the tree drives the plot of this second creation story. The intimate relationship between humans and trees is on full-display in both creation stories. From the way humans are both made from the earth to our dual call to be co-creators with God to the cautionary tale of humans getting our relationship all mixed up and backwards. Our tree-cousins exist as peers in these creation stories. 

Again and again, we are reminded that an important part of our call as humans - creatures formed from the humus - is to exist in right-relationship with trees and, indeed, all of creation. To be humble is not necessarily to be meek and mild. To be humble is to carry an awareness of that connection with the earth. To be grounded, rooted. To know who we are and our place in this vast and awe-some world. 

When I was a little girl, I had terrible vision. After we discovered I couldn’t see anything the teacher was writing on the board in 2nd grade, we went to the eye doctor and I got my first pair of glasses. It must have been October at that point because the trees were doing their colorful autumnal dance of glory. When we walked out of the eye-doctor’s office that day, I was, quite literally, looking at the world through a new pair of eyes. I looked up at the trees - a kaleidoscope of orange, gold, green, brown, red - and I gasped in surprise. I exclaimed to my mom, “You can see the individual LEAVES on the TREES?!?” I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life. 

God made our tree-cousins beautiful to the sight. God made our tree-cousins so very much like us. And we are called to remember that the trees are our friends, our neighbors, our peers. 

We probably all know this saying: “knock on wood,” right? We say this when we don’t want to inadvertently cause something bad to happen. People all over the world, across cultures and across centuries, have said something like this. There’s apparently something about that action of touching wood that reminds us humans to get in touch with our humility. We touch wood to remember that we, too, come from the earth. In connecting with our tree-cousins, we remember who we are. 

Kids these days have a thing that they say that’s a little like this. When someone is a bit out of touch with reality they say, “Touch grass.” It started in gamer-culture as a way of gently poking fun at someone who had clearly spent way too much time in front of a screen. “Touch grass,” they say. As in, “you need to unplug for a bit and get grounded. You need to get outside and into the real world. You need to remember who you are.”

We give thanks for our tree cousins who help us remember who we are and whose we are. May we always strive to be in right relationship with the trees and all of creation. Amen. 

NOTES:

[1] Cooperrider, Daniel. Speak with the Earth and it Will Teach You, 11.

[2] Ibid, 99. 

[3] Curry lecture at Festival of Homiletics, May 2023. 

[4] Cooperrider, 98. 

[5] Ibid., 98-99. 

[6] Ibid., 

“Good fences make good neighbors?”

Exodus 20:1-17 and Matthew 22:36-40

Sunday, June 11, 2023

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

My husband’s birthday and Father’s Day fall just a few weeks apart each year. Some year’s it’s challenging to come up with ideas for gifts for TWO holidays so close together. But THIS year it has been simple because all he wants in the world are sturdy structures. So far he’s received a new tent for camping, another tent-like thing that attaches to the back of our minivan, and I think he still has some kind of pole contraption on his list. STRUCTURE is what he wants. 

This is a direct result of ONE bad night of camping. Our older son is a part of a mountain biking team and they have 5-6 races throughout Kansas each spring. Because the races start early on Sunday morning and the riders need to create and pre-ride the course, families typically go out on Saturday and then camp together that night.

I am extremely grateful my husband has been willing to go on these weekend excursions because, otherwise, our kid wouldn’t get to participate. And he’s diligent about sending me lots of photos and videos, which I also very much appreciate. 

The first race of the season was out in western Kansas. The updates I got via text said they were doing great but it was “really windy.” We all bedded down for the night - they in their tent on the plains and I in my comfy bed with a roof over my head here in Manhattan. 

“Goodnight. Love you,” said the blue bubbles on glowing screens. 

The next morning, I checked in as I rushed around getting ready for church. The photos and videos arrived: their tent, which appeared to be flattened to the ground, and a video of the pitch-black with the sound of intense, loud rushing wind. David said it was a *little* hard to get a good night’s rest with the cacophony and roof of his tent smacking him in the face all night long. 

One bad night of sleep will make you OBSESSED with upgrading your outdoor gear. He immediately came home and started looking for a sturdier tent, stronger poles, more wind-resistance.

We who live on the wind-swept prairie know the importance of good boundaries. A sturdy roof or tarp over our heads. Barriers to block the water rushing out of our neighbor’s yard before it turns our yard into soup. Fences to catch the recycling and trash when it blows out of our bins and across the neighborhood. 

You have a poem by Robert Frost printed in your bulletin this morning. Perhaps you’ve had a chance to look at it. Perhaps you already know it. When Isabel sent it to Melissa and me a few months ago, it rang in my head right away. The part I remembered most clearly was the line, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The rest of it was murky. I’m not sure if I had ever paid much attention to it before. 

When I did finally sit down and read it through, I found myself chuckling a bit. “Good fences make good neighbors,” is NOT the point of the poem. Despite the refrain, Frost is not arguing the absolute ethical good of fences. The reality of the poem is more nuanced. After all, the author may chide his neighbor about the stone wall between them but he still meets him there year after year to mend it. 

The other line that was familiar to me was the opening: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” As much as we humans appreciate boundaries (and tent poles and sturdy roofs) we also chafe at them. “Rules are made to be broken,” etc. One of the things I love about driving across western Kansas is the vastness of the wide open prairie. Nary a boundary to be seen, save the roads. You can almost start to feel what it was like years ago before settlers came and divided the land into plots. 

Is it elves that cause us to chafe at the constriction of walls? Or something else? My sense is that most of us, deep down, are conflicted when it comes to boundaries. A bit of structure and expectations frees us up to make choices within a limited set of acceptable options. But too much structure and we start to lose our sense of inherent freedom. It’s a delicate balance, to be sure. 

Frost gets this. He may say “something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” but as we watch the narrator and his neighbor plod along next to their shared wall we can’t help but notice, “something there is that DOES love a wall,” right?

The narrator is not anti-wall, per se. He just wants his neighbor to think it through a bit. 

“Why do [fences] make good neighbors?” [he wonders.] Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

It’s not the WALL that Frost’s narrator takes issue with, it’s the unthinking automaticity of his neighbor: “he will not go beyond his father’s saying.” As we gather within these walls (and beyond these walls) today, we bring a wealth of different experiences, values, and norms. How often do we pass along our own religious/cultural/familial values without thinking - just reciting pithy sayings or customs passed down from our ancestors without thinking? Are we more like the narrator or neighbor in this story? My guess is, most of us are a little bit of both. 

The scripture texts we heard today show that these are not new questions. When the Israelites were newly freed from the yoke of slavery in Egypt, they found themselves a bit uncomfortable out there with no walls at all. Absolute freedom can be unmooring. And so their God sent walls in the form of two clay tables. Ten easy-to-remember rules for living. The ten words of YHWH appear both in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5. The passages are nearly identical, suggesting that our faith ancestors knew them and passed them along with great consistency. These words provided guidance, structure, shared expectations for living in community. 

Centuries later, people were still wondering about walls. So many of the stories in the gospels are about transgressing boundaries and expectations. Jesus’s genealogy includes unexpected ancestors like Rahab, Ruth, Tamar, and Bathsheba. There was something boundary-breaking about the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s conception and birth. And as Jesus grows into adulthood he begins to teach stories that make it clear he wants his followers to do just what Frost was advocating for in his poem: be very intentional about how and why and where you build walls. Who are you keeping out? Who are you constraining? And do the walls need to exist at all? 

Jesus, a faithful Jew, continued to teach the boundaries handed down to him by his faith ancestors. And, like all wise Jews, he wasn’t afraid to ask hard questions about why those guidelines existed. So it’s no surprise that he has a quick and easy answer to the question posed by the nameless lawyer in today’s passage. I’m sure he’d already given the question a lot of thought. 

‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”’

Jesus had clarity around what mattered most. Sturdy tent poles to withstand the buffeting winds of life. 

I hope and wish clarity for you, too. It might be the words of Jesus or it might be something else. But when the winds of change threaten to unmoor you, may your boat be tied to a sturdy wall that will keep you safely docked in the harbor of Love. 

I want to close with a story that’s not mine. This story comes from Thomas Oles, who is a scholar of landscape architecture. He wrote a book called Walls: Enclosure and Ethics in the Modern Landscape. Isabel was kind enough to turn Melissa and me on to this book. Thanks, friend. 

In the prologue he reflects on his experience studying landscape architecture in Denmark. 

I expected to find a socialist utopia of solidarity and fairness….Yet when I arrived, the news was bad. I found a safe, modern, prosperous society in the throes of xenophobia. 

A right-wing government had come to power and nearly halted all immigration to Denmark. The new politics was couched in the language of cultural triumphalism, the sense that Denmark was a special precinct reserved for the elect, who did not include people with dark skin or thin wallets. 

These changes in the political landscape came to shape the way I looked at the physical landscape. As I walked through cities, towns, and fields, a stranger in a strange land, I began to notice something distinctive about the Danish environment, something that at first had eluded my attention. This was the great variety of physical enclosures in the landscape. From traditional churchyards where each plot was surrounded by its own miniature hedge, to the hollowed-out perimeter blocks of Copenhagen, to the endless suburbs made up of one hedge-enclosed lot after another, each concealing a comfortable modern house, enclosure seemed to be everywhere including, ultimately, in the islands and peninsulas of Denmark itself.

I began to wonder about the convergence of the political and the material. On the one hand, it seemed that all this enclosure symbolized some kind of cultural closure; on the other, the ubiquitous walls and fences seemed to express the egalitarian and democratic character of Danish society, with each resident allotted a small, calm place of refuge and peace. The designer in me could not help admiring the results in the landscape, which was extremely legible and orderly, but the liberal in me wondered how they related to the nascent atmosphere in the country….I learned from talking to people on my many walks…that what I was seeing was almost invisible to the Danes themselves. When I asked about all this enclosure, people would often look at me as if I were mad. Later I would learn that these habits of enclosure were not somehow endemic to Danish culture but had been taught and learned in the 1960s, when home and garden magazines encouraged readers to enclose yards with high hedges and fences. The lesson had been absorbed so well that it was no longer subject to critical reflection. In Denmark a landscape of enclosure simply "was"…

Friends, as we move about in the world, may we carry with us the keen observational skills of landscape architects, poets, farmers, and ranchers. May we never be afraid to look at a wall - even a very old one - and wonder about its purpose. May we seek balance and wisdom when we choose to erect walls. May we tend to the walls that need to be repaired. And may we dismantle the walls that do not move us toward mutual flourishing. 

“Good fences make good neighbors,” the neighbor said. And, you know, it turns out he’s at least a bit right. But it’s not the boundary itself that makes these two men good neighbors to one another. 

Instead, it’s the shared stewardship, the coming together to care and tend, the conversation that flows in the shared labor. And the intentionality of mending. 

May it be so. 

“Down to the River”

Genesis 1:1-13 and Revelation 22:1-5

Sunday, June 4, 2023

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

I feel certain I’ve never begun a sermon with a quote from St. Augustine of Hippo (which is now in Algeria), but I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it. God, whom you want to discover never wrote that book with ink. Instead, God set before your eyes the things that God had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven and earth shout to you: “God made me!” [1]

You may have heard Christians referred to as “people of the book.” It’s a friendly term that Muslims use to categorize us and several other religions, like Judaism. We share many things in common with other monotheistic religions like Islam and one of them is that many of us hold certain books as sacred, scripture.

As important as the Bible is to us, it’s critical for us to remember one very important thing: the Bible is not God. 

We can find God IN the Bible, of course. We can also find God in art, nature, the heart of a friend, and even in the eyes of our enemies. The Bible is one way that our Stillspeaking God is revealed to us, but not the only way. 

St. Augustine knew this way back in the 4th century. He invites us to consider “a great book” - the book of all created things. The earth in all her splendor - and the stars and spinning planets, too. 

Writing some 1600 years later, another theologian, Father Richard Rohr (of Kansas!), came to similar conclusions. Rohr is known for his emphasis on the Universal, Cosmic Christ. Now, don’t think Jesus - Jesus is simply one incarnation of the Cosmic Christ he’s talking about. This Christ is bigger than Jesus - a divine energy that has existed since before Creation, infused into every part of creation, and known to us in the person of Jesus, but also in many other ways. In fact, Rohr says that the person of Jesus is actually not the first incarnation of God in the world. Instead, the FIRST incarnation is the created world.  [2]

Honoring that “first incarnation,” that “great book” is what we’ll be focused on this summer. Half the summer we'll be in conversation with this lovely book by UCC pastor Daniel Cooperrider, Speak with the Earth and it Will Teach You. The other half of the summer we’ll be going to “Compassion Camp” together on Sunday mornings - this camp is for all ages and will feature interactive and wiggly activities along with quieter, contemplative options. In all of it, we’ll be looking to the great book of nature as our guide as we draw near to God together. 

Cooperrider says his “aim is to reread the Bible in a living, breathing, yearning, determined search for God from the perspective of nature.” [3] Instead of viewing the world through the lens of scripture, which Christian theologians often do, he flips it, reading the Bible through the lens of nature. His book has four sections: rivers, mountains, trees, and clouds. So we’ll get to explore all four.

It seems only fitting that we would begin with rivers, since the Bible both begins and ends with water. Cooperrider notes that in the account of creation in Genesis 1, nearly half of the verses are about water - especially living, flowing water. [4]. Which shouldn’t be a surprise given that just over 70% of the earth’s surface is covered in water. As our indigenous neighbors remind us, “water is life,” and we humans would quickly cease to exist without it. While a person can survive several months without food, our bodies typically fail in less than a week without water. In fact, our bodies are mostly water! 50-75% water for most adults. Water truly is life. 

Life begins in the water, not just in the Genesis account, but for mammals, too. Before we sip air, we are nurtured in the waters of the womb. In many parts of the world, people honor this maternal connection with water by calling rivers Mother. In India, the Ganges is personified as a feminine goddess of purification and forgiveness. The word used for river in some parts of India, lokmata, means “mother of the people.” And in China the mighty MeKong river means “mother of water.” 

Rivers spring up as if by magic - Cooperrider tells a great story about walking and walking to find the origin of his local river. And rivers empty into the sea, filling the oceans with a seemingly-unending supply of fresh, living water. Along the way they nurture crops, provide places for people and critters to call home. We use them for transportation and as sources of energy. I grew up in a river town and learned to tell directions by where the river was - drawing a map in my head, I knew that the river was always East. 

Civilizations have always followed the course of rivers. That’s why if you look at a map of Kansas you’ll see our little I-70 corridor of bigger cities - Junction City, Manhattan, Topeka, Lawrence, Kansas City - and you can follow the Kansas River all the way from Milford Lake to Westport. The older roads show it more clearly - notice how state road 24 hugs the river closely from Manhattan to Topeka. 

If we can still trace the power of rivers while cruising at 75 miles per hour in our air-conditioned cars, surely it’s no surprise that our ancient scriptures are filled with rivers! Baby Moses floating in a basket. Miriam with her tambourine at the river’s edge. Jacob wrestling with an angel on a riverbank. Elijah refreshed with water from a nearby wadi. Jesus and John dipping down into the Jordan. Just as you can trace the Kansas River on your map, you can trace the stories of our faith ancestors by floating from Genesis to Revelation on our sacred river stories. 

Cooperrider reflects on growing up in Wisconsin, hearing tall tales of Paul Bunyan’s puzzlement over the Round River there - a series of interconnected waterways that will take you in a circle if you stay on them long enough, used for centuries to transport goods and people. “Of course,” he says, “if you follow any trail of water far enough, all rivers eventually return, connected as a part of this planet’s complex hydraulic circuit. In the end, ‘all things merge into one,’ as Norman Maclean put it in his fly-fishing classic, ‘and a river runs through it.’” [5] 

Round and round we go. Not just in Wisconsin, but throughout the earth. Oceans into vapor into clouds into rain into streams into rivers and back again. And our faith ancestors, seeking to understand what it means to be human, seeking to put to words that mysterious connection with the Mother Source we call God, they spoke of Round Rivers, too. 

In Genesis: “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches….”

And in Revelation: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city… Nothing accursed will be found there any more…. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever.”

A Round River holding it all. Will you sing with me if you know this song?

I went down to the river to pray

Studying about the good old way

And who shall wear the starry crown

Good Lord, show me the way. 

Oh, children, let’s go down.
Let’s go down. Come on down. 

Oh, children, let’s go down. 

Down to the river to pray. 

NOTES:

[1] Cooperrider, Daniel. Speak with the Earth and it Will Teach You, introductory material.

[2] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-first-incarnation-2019-02-21/ 

[3] Cooperrider, 11.

[4] Ibid., 18.

[5[ Ibid., 42